Solved Weird changes to windows after turning PC on

[OneZ]

Hello,

I have Windows 8.1 64 installed.
I turned my PC on today and I noticed some weird changes:

1. Wallpaper is changed to the default orange wallpaper.
2. Desktop settings are reset (icons visibility, screen saver, etc).
3. Apps in start menu disappeared (they are still installed, but no longer pinned).
4. If I sorted apps by date installed, I see that the following apps were installed today:
Store, PC Settings, Desktop, Camera, Photos, OneDrive, Application Verifier, Photo Gallery, Movie maker.
5. Folder called TEMP is created in C:\Users.
6. When I launch CMD it starts in C:\Users\TEMP.

The last thing I did was simply turning the PC off, and it turned off normally. No updates/installations were in progress.
No updates are newly installed (last update was a year ago).
Event logs don't show anything unusual.
No viruses detected.

Cheers.

 

[MilesAhead]

Do you have any backup image or restore point to undo the changes? If not, for future reference there are plenty of free partition image backup programs you can download. Several are listed on this page:
Free Hard Disk Backup and Restore, Hard Disk Image and Cloning Utilities (thefreecountry.com)

The "virus" may have been something that deleted itself once it hosed your user settings.

 

[OneZ]

Thanks for your reply.

Actually I'm more interested in the reason behind it rather than the actual problem. And yes I have a backup.

Anyway, the problem is that for some reason Windows created that temp user and logged me to it. I don't know why it did that.

Thanks anyway.

 

[MilesAhead]

If there is nothing in the log then it sounds like the malware was savvy enough to delete the lines from the end of the logs. Either that or Windows 10 tried to update. I keep Windows Update disabled. Too many fixes spoil the broth. It's a nightmare trying to trace what happened when things break and 100 fixes went on at once.

Anyway, glad you have a backup.